MAIN ECONOMIC INDICATORS DATABASE NOTES
MAY 2005

AVAILABLE ON DISK FROM 11-05-2005
(STA05)DBNotes/May

HOURLY EARNINGS

The HOURLY EARNINGS (manufacturing) subject table
has been completely revised. All country series are now seasonally adjusted and
a new methodology for compiling OECD area total series has been introduced.
These changes are described in the following article "Planned
changes to the MEI Hourly earnings subject table". Associated changes to
series codes are provided in the Countries List below.

SEASONAL ADJUSTMENTS

New seasonal adjustments by OECD are generally carried out once a year, when the December figure is available.
Revisions to individual series due to new seasonal adjustments by national source or by OECD are not signalled in this note.

FOR FURTHER DETAILS

Detailed methodological information, updated with a delay of one month, is available on this CD-ROM in \doc\MetaCtr.htm or at http://www.oecd.org/std/mei.
Questions relating to these database notes should be directed by e-mail to stat.contact@oecd.org.

These series have been revised by source since 1991. These revisions were necessary to include late receipt of sales estimates from retailers (thus replacing imputed data), changes to reported information, changes in the classification of some businesses and updates to seasonal and trading day factors.

The following series have been revised by source in February 2005 following a benchmarking based on the results of the 2001 Census of Population and Housing. Consequently, historical data have been recalculated by source from January 2000 to January 2005.